An eloquent, prize-winning historian chronicles the rise of Black enterprise in America.

Entrepreneurs like Booker T. Washington and Madam C.J. Walker are familiar figures in the history of Black business. But from the hopeful dawn of emancipation to the crucible of Jim Crow, from rural Mound Bayou, Mississippi, to the bustling blocks of Harlem, many others built extraordinary businesses in pursuit of prosperity and freedom. Nevertheless, their efforts to pursue the American Dream were steadily undermined by people intent on profiting on their innovations and reining in their opportunities. Award-winning historian Shennette Garrett-Scott reveals the everyday genius of the people who refused to accept exclusion as identity: former slaves turned cotton mill owners, washerwomen turned financiers, and self-taught visionaries who built banks, real estate empires, and grocery store chains. Their successes were real, but ventures that promised economic independence often provoked backlash as white elites, politicians, and vigilantes tried to contain Black success. Even the boldest dreams often buckled under the combined weight of limited resources and state obstruction.

A daring tale, lyrically told, The Business of Freedom reveals the history, strengths, and weaknesses of Black capitalism as a strategy for both individual and collective empowerment and shows why free enterprise alone could never deliver the freedom its champions promised.

26 illustrations

From the PEN-nominated author of The Blueprint comes a moving novel about two women connected by music, memory—and murder.

Texas, 1983. Lola Jones is in prison for the death of her mother’s former lover, a man whose presence tangled itself through both their lives. After years of silence, Lola writes a letter to the dead man’s daughter—the “secret sister” from the better part of town in whose shadow Lola has lived most of her life.

As Lola reaches across time and memory, her story unfolds in two mirrored movements: the first, a chronicle of her mother, Camille, a blues singer shaped by love, ambition, and loss; the second, a recounting of Lola’s own coming of age in the echo of Camille’s legacy.

Braided with music, memory, and the weight of being misunderstood, Sweet Water explores inheritance, identity, and the ways women learn to survive what they cannot control. It is a story about Black women connected and separated by their experiences with each other, and with the men in their lives. Written as a letter, structured like a blues song—call and response, verse and refrain—the novel asks what it means to reclaim your voice when someone else’s pain has defined your existence.

Celebrate Brenda Jackson's 150th book, Spilling the Tea! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Tuesday, May 15 @ 7PM

Where: Kindred Stories Reading Garden (2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004)

How: RSVP WITH BOOK

ABOUT THE BOOK

Ninety-something Mama Laverne is determined to find all of her great-grandchildren their perfect match before going home to glory. So far, her success rate is 100 percent—and she intends to keep it that way.

Ninety-something-year-old Felicia Laverne Madaris, known in the family as Mama Laverne, is determined to find all of her great-grandchildren the perfect match before she goes home to glory. So far, her success rate is 100 percent, and she intends to keep it that way.

After sustaining injuries in Iraq, US Army Ranger Chancellor (Chance) Madaris was told he’d never walk again. Chance credits his great-grandmother, Mama Laverne, with giving him the will and fortitude to heal and prove the doctors wrong. He has a healthy respect for her meddling ways and knows he’ll eventually end up next on her matchmaker’s list.

When Zoey Pritchard was eight, she survived a car accident that left both her parents dead. She was sent to live with her great-aunt who refused to speak about her parents. Zoey has no memory from before the crash, but she’s been having the same dream over and over…

Guided by nothing but a hunch and images from her dream, Zoey travels to Houston. Searching for answers, Zoey uncovers a scandal involving her parents and the wealthy and powerful Madaris family. Her trail leads her straight to Chance’s door. The dislike and intense attraction are instant and simultaneous. Was it chance or Mama Laverne’s plan to throw this pair together?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BRENDA JACKSON is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than one hundred contemporary multicultural romance novels, including the Madaris Family series, the Westmorelands series, and The Playas series. She was the first African-American author to have a book published under the Harlequin/Silhouette Desire line and the first African-American romance author to hit both the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists in the series romance genre. Many of her books have been adapted into movies. Brenda lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and divides her time between family, writing and traveling. brendajackson.net.

The story that captivated readers―now complete for the first time.

Passion for the Heist introduced readers to the love story of Passion Adams and Percy “Pain” Wells―a tale of survival, betrayal, and love. Now, experience The Wild Hearts Duology in one volume, including Passion for the Heist and the never-before-published sequel, Murder of Crows.

A crime brought them together. Grief bound them. Love made them infamous.

Percy “Pain” Wells returned from prison with two things: a ruined reputation and his grandmother’s medical bills. Debts don’t care if he’s trying to go straight, and the streets he once ruled now whisper his name like a warning.

Passion Adams has nothing left but the locket holding her parents’ ashes, a monster for an uncle, and habits that numb the pain. When the locket is stolen in a robbery, she thinks it’s gone forever. Then it turns up in the hands of a stranger with hardened eyes and a calm that screams danger.

Pain should walk away, but something about Passion―her fire, her pain―won’t let him go. Their lives collide, and what starts as a mission to make things right becomes a fight to stay alive. Their explosive love turns two broken souls into the most wanted names in the city, hunted by cops and the underworld alike.

For Passion and Pain, there are only two ways out: disappear into the shadows or become the story everyone tells.

From the 2025 Children’s Literature Legacy Award winner, New York Times bestselling, and multiple award-winning author Carole Boston Weatherford comes a powerful nonfiction picture book that follows the individual acts of courage behind the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott.

In Montgomery, everyone relied on the city’s buses, but only white riders could sit in the front. If white riders needed more seats, Black riders had to give theirs up. And the white bus drivers would call the police whenever they wanted to. How could the Black community fight for their rights?

With incredible coordination and planning, Black people across the city carefully planned a boycott. When Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to give her seat up to a white rider, they were ready to act. But, as the months drew on, everyone found themselves wondering: What would it take to end the boycott?

Award-winning team Carole Boston Weatherford and Noa Denmon unite to tell the remarkable story of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and the people who achieved justice by working together.

* Important American History: This book spotlights the collective action of the Civil Rights Movement.
* Unsung Heroes: Strength in Numbers celebrates the many people who made the long bus boycott a success.
* Impressive Back Matter: This book features an extensive timeline, along with additional information about the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

In this Level Three I Can Read, join twins Jada and Jamal, and their best friends Carlita and Josh as they come up with a colorful springtime plan to spruce up their schoolyard. Everyone in the neighborhood is invited!

CHIRP! CHIRP! CHIRP! It’s springtime on Bradford Street. Jada and Jamal are searching for signs of spring. So are their best friends, Carlita Garcia and Josh Cornell. But the most surprising sign of spring awaits them at school tomorrow . . . a surprise that blossoms into a colorful plan to beautify the schoolyard just in time for Earth Day. Get set to dig in and join the neighborhood fun with the Bradford Street Buddies!

This Level 3 I Can Read title is written for independent readers and includes challenging words and more complex themes and stories.

Three children become involved in a world-altering game in the first book of an epic middle grade duology following in the tradition of The Giver and Ender’s Game—by celebrated Newbery Honor Author and National Book Award finalist Rita Williams-Garcia.

In the idyllic childhood place of Kumbla, Lows grow up with no wants, no danger, no parents, only endless games. But there comes a time in every Low's life when they yearn to test their skill and leave Kumbla for the Place of All Games—where there lies a challenge most are doomed to fail.

Kili is one among these many failed Lows. But unlike those before him, he’s returning to Kumbla, and with something remarkable: a second chance.

Kuwan is unlike the other Lows, content to never leave Kumbla. But Kili’s fate, and the fate of their world, rests in his ability to play his best game ever.

In an epic tale of innocence lost and family gained, and a gripping meditation on the futility of war, Newbery Honor author Rita Williams-Garcia reminds us that while children may become pawns in the great games of adults, they should never be underestimated.

A globe-spanning jigsaw puzzle of a novel about what it is to be human during this nervous, catastrophic moment in time.

Dionne Brand’s brief, powerful small life has the dazzling, hypnotic rhythm of a series of waves, tossing together multiple narrators and stories in time and space. The novel works through affective momentum, through gathering velocity, through multiplying and quickening voices and stories. None of these vividly alive characters know one another, but all exist inside this nervous moment in time.

Throughout the novel, characters’ voices recur in random ways, each around their own “small life.” Each person is in the middle of an action or a demand or a situation or a misunderstanding, and each is attempting to find a life, to know a life, to navigate the precarity of life. These lives are unfolding anywhere in the world: leaving the outskirts of Cartagena, working the streets of Madrid, caught in a toxic flood, hanging on to the edge of a boat in the Mediterranean, cleaning a stall in a North American airport, setting off to work on an oil platform, refusing eviction from an apartment. Their stories build and braid through inference, familiarity, and emotion―shock, realization, small joy―offering glimpses of the innermost workings of human beings in our contemporary, catastrophic zeitgeist.

A New York Times Notable Book

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic investigates the roles of race and sex in his own life and in literary history.

Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer's subjects: his mother, a self-described "Negress," who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother of Malcolm X, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son's misogyny and racism; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other Black people or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men; and the late Owen Dodson, a poet and dramatist who was female-identified and who played an important role in the author's own social and intellectual formation.

Hilton Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to his inimitable scrutiny with relentless humor and sympathy. The results are exhilarating. Written in 1996, long before the rise of the genre-defying memoir, The Women was a prescient work of criticism and self-investigation whose clear-eyed insight still feels fresh and urgent to this day. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that created a form all its own.

The bookclub meeting will take place on January 25, 2024 at 7 PM in The Reading Room (inside The Post). Be sure to show up with the book read (or partially read) but you are always welcome to just come and take up space. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Disrupt and push back against capitalism and white supremacy. In this book, Tricia Hersey, aka The Nap Bishop, encourages us to connect to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming, and naps as a foundation for healing and justice.

What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine‑level pace –– feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own relentless benefit.

In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey, aka the Nap Bishop, casts an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted. Our worth does not reside in how much we produce, especially not for a system that exploits and dehumanizes us. Rest, in its simplest form, becomes an act of resistance and a reclaiming of power because it asserts our most basic humanity. We are enough. The systems cannot have us.

Rest Is Resistance is rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism. With captivating storytelling and practical advice, all delivered in Hersey’s lyrical voice and informed by her deep experience in theology, activism, and performance art, Rest Is Resistance is a call to action, a battle cry, a field guide, and a manifesto for all of us who are sleep deprived, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of Grind Culture.

Celebrate the release of If This World We're Mine with Arriel Vinson!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, January 28 @ 7 PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St. Houston, TX 77004)

How: 

• RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat.

• RSVP WITH BOOK to reserve your seat and purchase a copy If This World We're Mine, supporting both the author and our store programming. The book will be available for pickup at the event.

Please Note: Books purchased from other retailers are not permitted in the bookstore and are not eligible for the signing or photo line. To participate in the signing and photo opportunity, you must purchase a copy from Kindred Stories.If you already have a copy from Kindred Stories feel free to choose the RSVP only option. 

If you purchase a ticket and are unable to attend the event, your ticket is non-refundable. If your ticket includes a book, an email will be sent to all attendees before and after the event with instructions on how to receive your book. Books must be claimed within 14 days following the event. If your book is not retrieved it will be returned to the publisher and will not be available for pick up in the future.

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arriel Vinson is a Midwesterner who writes about being young, Black, and in search of freedom. Her debut YA novel-in-verse, Under the Neon Lights, is a 2026 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award winner, a Reese’s Book Club LitUp selection, and a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection. Arriel earned her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and is a Tin House YA Scholar, Highlights Foundation scholarship recipient, and Walter Grant recipient. Her sophomore novel, If This World Were Mine, is forthcoming in spring 2027. You can connect with her on social media at @arriwrites and find her work at arriwrites.com

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

LIARA TAMANI grew up in Houston, Texas, where every spring meant one thing: rodeo season. She loved getting decked out in her best cowgirl gear and soaking up the music, food, and electric energy of the rodeo, a joy she now shares with her daughter and husband. Her deep Texas roots shine through her storytelling, capturing the spirit and rhythms of the state in all her acclaimed novels: Calling My Name, All the Things We Never Knew, and What She Missed. Before becoming a writer, she attended Harvard Law School and worked as a marketing coordinator for the Houston Rockets and Comets, television production assistant, home accessories designer, floral designer, and yoga and dance teacher. She holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA from Duke University.

“Engrossing and informative.” ―Zaakir Tameez, New York Times Book Review

From one of the most acclaimed and influential historians of the United States, an insightful guide to our history and why it matters.

Eric Foner has done more to shape the public and professional understanding of American history than any other scholar. The preeminent historian of the Civil War era, Foner’s keynote has been American freedom and the recurring battles over its meanings and boundaries. His award-winning works show that freedom has been a birthright for some and a struggle for others, that rights gained can also be lost, and that they must always be tended with knowledge and vigilance. The present political moment makes the importance of these themes abundantly clear.

This collection of Foner’s recent reviews and commentaries demonstrates the range of his interests and expertise, running from slavery and antislavery, through the disunion and remaking of the United States in the nineteenth century, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, and into our current politics. Each piece shows a master at work, melding historical knowledge and balanced judgment with crystalline prose. Foner takes up towering figures from Washington to Lincoln, Douglass, and Rosa Parks, pivotal events such as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the fragility of constitutional guarantees to civil liberties, due process, and birthright citizenship, whether in times of war or peace. He also explores recent controversies over how to commemorate, and how to teach, our history.